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Stanford Researchers Crack “Captcha” Test

Oh, Captcha. The bane of my online-buying existance. Is that an “E” or a “C”? Lower case “B” or lower case “H”? Hopefully this recent development will force developers to think of a new, slightly less annoying way to protect our identities online.

Their bot is 25% effective in breaking the security used on Wikipedia, 43% on eBay and up to 66% on the Visa site belongs to authorize.net. The program worked pretty good on Digg and pages belonging to CNN. Most of the commonly used methods of protection are failing to the new tool created in Stanford University…

The program removes background noise from the image and then splits the text into individual letters, which are easier to identify than a whole words. After the publication of the document, Visa and Digg started using reCAPTCHA on their websites.

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5 Responses to Stanford Researchers Crack “Captcha” Test

I really hate when the Captcha uses foreign letters and symbols. I'm like "I have no idea how to do that on my keyboard, arg!" And it's really annoying when you're filling out a form with the captcha at the bottom, and by the time you get to it, it's timed out and you have to start all over again. =_=;;;;;

I'm kinda glad they've cracked it. I hope someone thinks up a better, less annoying method. Though I suspect we'll just be introduced to more annoyances instead. D:

Yeah, when are we going to get to a point where the use of spam bots is legally moderated so the rest of the 99.99999999999999999% of the internet using audience doesn't have to put up with that crap in the first place?

Why not just have a picture of something random? For example a tree, what color are the leaves. Type in the answer and bam your good to go. Or better yet do away with the system, bots have been getting around this for years now.